This Day in Country Music History (Roger Miller, Witty ‘King of the Road,’ Born)

Jan. 2, 1936— Roger Miller, who rode his offbeat wit and songwriting brilliance from a stint as a hotel “singing bellhop” to crossover success on the country and pop charts, then to a late-career Broadway triumph as composer of the Tony-winning musical Big River, was born in Fort Worth, Texas.

At the height of his career, from 1964 to 1966, hardly anyone was as ubiquitous on the American musical scene—except those four mop-tops from Liverpool. Miller scored 10 Top 40 crossover hits, along with 11 Grammy Awards—a record at the time.

But numbers only told part of the story. He also made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, for a piece on the boom in country music; headlined his own variety show; and maintained a high-flying lifestyle and touring schedule.

It was all heady stuff for someone who lost his father at age one and had to work on an uncle’s farm when his mother couldn’t support the family; a teenage drifter whose theft of a guitar led him to join the U.S. Army in Korea rather than serve time in prison; and a backup musician who, despite having his own songs recorded by prominent Nashville artists, was having trouble at one low point landing paying gigs in his own right.

In fact, as noted in the fifth episode of Ken Burns’ Country Music PBS series, Miller was at the point of ending his solo act and heading to Los Angeles for an acting career when the startling success of his novelty song “Dang Me” changed his plans.

"The day 'Dang Me' was released, I played a little club in northern California for seventy-five dollars," Miller told William Whitworth in a 1969 profile for The New Yorker. "Had four people in the audience and got a hot check. But in about a week my phone started ringing. Wanting to do this and that, and pictures, and busy, busy, busy. After that, uh, I don't know what became of me.”

The song peaked at number 7 on Billboard Magazine’s pop chart, and reached number 1—and spent 25 weeks—on the magazine’s country-music chart. This humorous lament of a reprobate was endlessly charming—so much so that Oregon Congressman Rod Chandler, hoping to deflect charges that he spent $100,000 on congressional mailings while many constituents went jobless in the recession of the early 1990s, began singing the lyrics in a TV debate during his 1992 Senate race against Patty Murray. (The ploy bombed.)

But the tune that brought him the greatest success was his “hobo song,” “King of the Road.” It took him far longer to compose than “Dang Me” (six weeks versus four minutes), but it became the signature song of the “Dashboard Poet” who, as noted in Brian Carpenter’s Southern Cultures article, composed so much while on the road that he found that “there was something about laying hands to the wheel that freed up the songwriter in his mind.”

Individual song lines seemed to spring fresh, almost fully minted, even from Miller’s carefree conversations. While he was fond of telling fellow songwriters he had only one line, that was often a gem—yet he refused to take even a credit when that line became a part of a smash record for them.

Maybe it was because, at the height of his career, the inspiration for his own music seldom flagged. It’s hard to top songs with memorable titles like “You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd,” “The Moon is High (and So Am I),” “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me,” and “My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died.”

A creative and commercial lull set in for Miller in the 1970s, but by this time his idiosyncratic songwriting and concise recording arrangements (a sharp variation from the lusher “Nashville Sound” prevalent at the time) were influencing such “Progressive Country” artists as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Emmylou Harris.

For all his charming but sometimes undisciplined ways, the former Nashville "Wild Child" managed to mount an improbable comeback two decades after his commercial peak. Shrugging off a 1974 film attempt to adapt Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a musical, Miller had far better luck with the 1985 Broadway production of Big River. 

It not only won that year’s Tony Award for Best Musical, but earned Miller one for best score. It has since become a staple of regional and high school theaters, and was revived in 2003 on Broadway in a joint production by the Roundabout Theatre Co. and Deaf West Theatre.

In 1992, Miller passed away from throat cancer. Three years later, he was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. I’m sure there are others like me who wish he could have kept his creativity fires burning longer and more consistently. But in the end, his intelligence, talent, rollicking humor, and sheer joy in performing remain irresistible.

(For a fine career retrospective on Miller, see musician Deke Dickerson’s 2011 post on his “Muleskinner” blog. I think you will also find much to enjoy in an all-star tribute to Miller in a cover version of “King of the Road” featuring Nelson, Kristofferson, Harris, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam—and, with tongue in cheek on the lyric “man of means,” such country queens as Dolly Parton and Brenda Lee.)

This Day in Country Music History (Hank Williams Takes Grand Ole Opry by Storm)

June 11, 1949—Hank Williams, 25, making the most of what amounted to an audition at country music’s premier arena, made an electrifying debut at the Grand Ole Opry, earning an unprecedented six encores from the delighted audience. Three years later, in a significant signpost of his decline, the same scene of his first triumph would turn him away because of his alcohol-induced unreliability.

Williams had scored his first hit two years before with “Move It on Over.” Ironically, the song that earned him an invitation to Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, “Lovesick Blues,” was one that the prolific songwriter did not write.

Over the years, questions would arise as to who actually introduced Williams to the audience on the 11^th. A post on the blog Fayfare indicates that it was not singer Roy Acuff, nor Red Foley  (who hosted the “Prince Albert Show” portion of the bill at the Opry) but rather Ernest Tubb, introducing him during the 9:30 pm Warren Paint portion of the show. (Williams would appear again a week later in a shorter, tighter program.)

In his brief career, Williams recorded 66 songs, with 37 becoming hits. Among the diverse artists who covered his songs were Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Perry Como, and Dinah Washington. It would all be over on New Year’s Day 1953, by which time the 29-year-old singer, haunted by problems with booze, a bad back, and a collapsed marriage, had been forced to play beerhalls in Louisiana and Texas. One of the last songs he recorded before his untimely demise was eerily prophetic: “The Angel of Death.”

This Day in Country Music History (Johnny Cash “Walks the Line” in 1st Marriage)

August 7, 1954—At St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church in San Antonio, Texas, on a hot, humid day, The Man in Black wed the woman in white, as Johnny Cash, discharged from the Air Force the prior month, married Vivian Liberto, whom he had met just before his enlistment four years before.

Despite his pledge to stay with her “till death do us part,” the union did not survive his exposure to fame as a country-music superstar, his raging amphetamines addiction, or his encounter with a member of country-music royalty, June Carter.

What was the singer’s pickup line to the Catholic schoolgirl? I bet it was the same one he used to woo audiences over five decades: “Hi, I’m Johnny Cash.”

Walk the Line (2002) is one of the better entries in the musical-biography genre, but that’s not to say it’s faultless. In the inevitable focus on Johnny and June Carter Cash, one person is inevitably slighted: the last person in the love triangle, Vivian Cash.

At least two of the children of Johnny and Vivian, Rosanne Cash and Kathy Cash, were unhappy with the biopic’s portrayal of their mother, with Kathy actually bolting out of a screening. And well she might do that: Vivian was depicted as a harpy who practically drove her husband out with her screaming and her periodic pregnancies that threatened to tie him down to a conventional career rather than the bohemian artistic life he was meant for.

Vivian Cash is in something analogous to the same position as Cynthia Lennon: as the castoff consort to a musical monarch with immense talent, equal charm—and demons from childhood that often overrode his best instincts. Vivian might have even had it worse with the public than Cynthia, who at least benefited from residual sympathy from fans who believed that Yoko Ono contributed to the Beatles’ breakup.

In contrast, June Carter Cash did not separate her husband from fellow musicians; in fact, she drew him further into this lifestyle. Moreover, she was not only blessed with a special musical talent but with powerful vivacity.

I got a sense of this several years ago when, after her death, a local New York radio station aired an interview with her. As she related her days studying acting in New York (where she came to know a very young James Dean), the advancing years fell away and you fell under the spell of a still-girlish voice, showing off a terrific sense of humor. It was obvious why Cash had fallen hard for her.

In 1950, at a roller-skating rink in San Antonio, he had fallen equally hard—but without the guilt—for Vivian. The short time they spent together before he shipped off (only three weeks) only hastened their relationship. "We would walk on the river, and we sat there and did what we shouldn't have done and carved our names in the bench," she told an interviewer more than 50 years later.

Even separated by an ocean, the passion shared by Cash and Vivian still burned brightly, as they exchanged, if you can believe this, 10,000 pages of letters over four years.

Unfortunately, the young man’s torment was apparent, too. Many men might think twice about confessing to their far-away spouse about drinking and visiting prostitutes, but not Cash. It was a portent of a troubled marriage.

Once they were married, the blue skies were fewer and the dark clouds more numerous for the couple. An unfulfilling job selling appliances and an inability to break into radio strained the family finances—then led to Cash’s career-changing visit to the Sun Records studio in Memphis. Never too far from her husband was lingering survivor’s guilt (a brother had died during childhood).

Afraid of the women he met on the road, Vivian asked him point-blank if he had ever strayed. He assured her that though the temptations were plentiful, “I walk the line.” (When she wrote her own memoir with Ann Sharpsteen 40 years later, Vivian recalled scribbling down the lyrics to this signature song while Cash was driving, or while the couple were in their living room.)

It’s too bad that Joaquin Phoenix committed career hari-kari in his David Letterman appearance a while back, because his performance in Walk the Line showed how sleek, electric and dangerous Cash was onstage as a young man. I wish all of the film could have matched the truth of his acting.

I’m not just talking here about how Walk the Line distorted the singer’s relationship with Vivian. I’m also referring to the way it distorts his relationship with June.

As Michael Streissguth demonstrated in his biography of the singer two years ago, the myth—one continued by the film—is that after finding love with June, Cash was able eventually to conquer his amphetamine addiction and never stray from his wedding vows again.

The reality was that, aside from a six-year period in the early 1970s following the birth of his son John Carter Cash, the singer continued to struggle with temptations toward pills and extramarital dalliances until his final illness.

This Day in Country Music History (Johnny Cash Performs at Folsom Prison)

January 13, 1968 – The legend of Johnny Cash, a part of the rockabilly and country-music scene since his first recordings for Sun Records in the mid-1950s, grew larger with his concert at Folsom Prison in Northern California. The subsequent Columbia recording, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, released that summer, went on to appear on the country music charts for 90 weeks – and, even more amazingly on Billboard’s Top 200 for 122 weeks.

The explosive popularity of the concert and record took nearly everyone by surprise. The late Sixties were an era when, in the words of the 1981 Barbara Mandrell song, it wasn’t easy being country “when country wasn’t cool.” Psychedelic rock was filling more and more corners of the airwaves. 

Particularly nettlesome, in an era when rising crime was causing daily headlines – and in a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy – was Cash’s decision not only to perform in a prison but to record a live album there. Studio exec Clive Davis – an industry guru fabled then and now for shrewd business instincts – even warned that it would destroy the singer’s career.

But the concert was a triumph, filled with stark moments such as Cash singing the stunning line, “I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die" or performing "Greystone Chapel," a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, serving a five-to-life term for armed robbery. 

But inevitably, myth has grown around much of the concert, notably around the song “Folsom Prison Blues.” Though Cash did have several run-ins with the law (chiefly over drugs) and the image he cultivated as an “outlaw” with buddies Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Cash was inspired to write the latter song not out of personal experience but after watching the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951).